


active listening

by youcouldmakealife



Series: duelling banjos [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-12 00:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19217758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: He’d been wordless on the ice too, just a yell after his goal, their collision. If he’d said anything, Alexei hadn’t heard it through the impact.





	active listening

Returning to Vancouver feels very different than arriving the first time did. Different than the numerous other times he returned last season: he’s not high on a win or stewing over a loss, he’s crammed on a plane beside a woman with an infant that will not stop crying rather than shoulder to shoulder with a teammate, usually Julien. 

The relief, however, is the same. Stronger, but the same. He’s not sure when landing in Vancouver started evoking that feeling, but it’s far from unfamiliar by now.

Entering training camp brings the same feeling, awash with others: a hum of excitement, expectation, and when he takes his place by Julien in the room, everything seems to fall into place.

*

The media turns on Julien before the season’s even begun, and Alexei perhaps shouldn’t be surprised, but he is. Shocked, even, and furious.

As if he hadn’t been nominated for a Calder. As if he wasn’t the one who should have won it. As if his play in his rookie season wasn’t a revelation, hadn’t taken them all by surprise. How can they have the audacity to claim that they can predict how he’ll do, when they were blindsided by him in the first place?

He says all that, the best he can, says it every time something new comes out. He says it a lot.

“I know,” Julien interrupts. Alexei doesn’t like being placated, and that’s what this is: Julien cutting him off because he isn’t interested in hearing what he has to say. He probably does know, he probably knows every single thing Alexei’s saying, but he doesn’t believe it, he doesn’t believe him. He believes what they’re saying about him, even as he pretends to brush it off. The media’s getting to him. Has gotten to him.

If Alexei had his way, they’d never have to face the media before games. Well, if Alexei had his way, they’d never have to face the media at all, but he knows that’s unrealistic, so he’d settle for a blanket refusal from the team to let the media psych them out before they even step onto the ice. Not that it gets to him, necessarily; it’s inconvenient and sometimes irritating, and he never likes speculating about games that haven’t happened yet, but it’s more of a frustrating necessity than anything else.

It clearly bothers Julien.

They face the press after two straight losses — close games, tight games, though you wouldn’t know it judging from the questions hurled in their faces. They’re playing the Golden Seals, a hard team to face during the best of times, and as the media is enjoying pointing out, this isn’t the best of times. Julien, pointless in the last four games, spends more time answering questions than anyone barring their captain and their coach, and his face as they get ready for warm ups reads as the opposite of game face. Alexei watches him for a moment, sees the infinitesimal movement of a muscle in Julien’s jaw tic. Something that makes him realize he’s sitting too close, he’s paying too much attention.

Alexei looks away, focuses on his stick instead. The satisfying noise the tape makes, somewhere between a rip and a wrench, the motion of winding it, so ingrained it’s almost meditative. Focuses on his stick, and not the presence of Julien beside him, silently miserable, because there’s nothing he can say that he already hasn’t said already, nothing he can say that Julien would listen to, there’s nothing he can do.

At the end of the game, Julien’s pointless in five straight games. They won, but you wouldn’t know it, looking at his face.

*

“Do you think last season was a fluke?” a reporter asks before they play a game in Calgary, and Julien says no, only admits after, so low that only Alexei can hear him, that he doesn’t know what the word means.

Alexei’s picked it up somewhere — wouldn’t put it past reading it one of the articles on Julien. He explains it, and then, when Julien’s frown gets so deep it looks like it’s been carved into his face, he assures Julien it wasn’t a fluke. Nothing about Julien is a fluke. 

“Okay,” Julien says, but not like he believes him, and Alexei seethes.

Alexei and Julien combine for four points that night, a goal and a primary assist apiece, and it shuts the media up. Or, rather, it doesn’t, articles all claiming Julien’s ‘heating up’ or ‘reached his stride’, with no indication that they remember saying, a mere day earlier, that they should never have expected anything from him at all, that it was a fluke. A fucking fluke.

Alexei can practically still feel the collision of Julien’s body against his, long after the game is over. It must be the feeling of unexpected triumph, looking his critics in the eye before taking every single argument they made about him out at the knees without saying a single word.

He’d been wordless on the ice too, just a yell after his goal, their collision. If he’d said anything, Alexei hadn’t heard it through the impact.

*

Julien plays better after that. 

That is an understatement. Insufficient. Inadequate. 

Alexei just isn’t entirely sure how to describe the change: the media has no such difficulty, though of course unlike Alexei, the media doesn’t care much for accuracy.

He plays like he did last season. He plays like he does when they stay late after practice, the arena empty but for them and the zamboni driver, who says he doesn’t mind, sits off to the side and reads a book until they’re through, the looseness of knocking the puck around, picking a spot and seeing who gets there first: top shelf, off the crossbar, bottom right, ringing in from the post. Alexei usually does, but not always. Julien’s a playmaker, they call him a playmaker, but anyone who thinks he can’t score hasn’t been paying attention.

Alexei doesn’t know if anyone else notices how different Julien is without the weight on his shoulders. Probably not — the language barrier’s sufficient enough that he’s heard others describe him as ‘quiet’, which isn’t accurate, at least in Alexei’s view. Julien talks a lot, actually, more than he did last season, and Alexei doesn’t know if that’s because he’s more comfortable with the language, or more comfortable with Alexei. Perhaps both, or perhaps it’s comfort that Alexei knows his language — he speaks in a rapidfire French Alexei still doesn’t quite have a handle on, but he can understand enough to follow.

Once Julien’s shaken it off — the media, his own sense of failure, written across his face so obviously Alexei was surprised no one else seemed to see it — it’s like it had never been there at all, the doubt, the insecurity, and Alexei hadn’t realized how much he missed him until he’s back, talking about whatever comes to his head — plays and opponents, yes, but also a new restaurant he wants Alexei to try with him, the weather, a seemingly endless string of siblings. 

Alexei still hasn’t figured out how many he has, though he’s fairly confident it’s more than five. He can’t imagine it, growing up like that, all that noise. Maybe that’s why Julien talks so much, when it’s the two of them. Between a crowded home and a locker room that doesn’t understand him, it’s where he has a chance to speak.

Alexei doesn’t say as much, doesn’t have a chance to, but for all Julien’s chatter, when Alexei talks, he stops, and he listens.

*

The season goes well, but not well enough. Anything other than the Stanley Cup is disappointing. That’s inevitable. There are twenty-one teams in the league all vying for the same goal, and twenty are going to fall short. Their chances are less than five percent at the start of the season, then still only six once they reach the postseason. They slowly tick upward as the playoffs wear on, but even making the Finals leaves you with a fifty percent chance of failure.

Of course, they didn’t reach the Finals. They didn’t even reach the second round, like last year. They were out before the buzzer went to close Game Six. Desperation wasn’t enough to take them anywhere, not in a game they were losing 5-2 by the end of the second. They brought it within two, but that was all.

Alexei undresses in a silent dressing room, and he’s grateful for the silence. He has to be grateful for something right now, so he’s grateful for that.

The mood in the plane ride back is dark, a little ugly. Alexei’s trying to swallow back disappointment, in himself and in everyone else, but he can tell some of the other guys are feeling something closer to anger, that the wrong word right now might lead to an explosion.

He measures his words carefully, pitches them low enough that they only reach Julien’s ears.

“It’ll happen,” Alexei says in French, nudging his knee against Julien’s, dropping his hand on his for emphasis, because Julien doesn’t seem to be listening, not the way he usually does, with his whole body: eyes on Alexei, nodding at points. Alexei sometimes wonders if he’s aware he’s doing it, but he doesn’t want to ask in case he isn’t, in case it makes him self-conscious.

Julien’s hand flexes under his, tendon and bone under skin that feels fever hot, and Alexei swallows, pulls his hand back before he can be sure if Julien was even listening.


End file.
